Benchmarks for 200

The "near blizzard" we've had this week has reminded me of one of my all time favorite movies -- Groundhog Day. And one of my favorite scenes in this movie (without giving the plot away to the 2 people who haven't seen it yet) is when Bill Murray is able to smugly answer all of the Jeopardy! questions. Wouldn't it be great to be able to do that?

IBM just announced this morning that the Jeopardy! games between IBM's Watson computer and human contestants will be held in mid-February. The Jeopardy! format provides the ultimate challenge because the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not. The executive producer of the show deemed the game "a benchmark of ultimate knowledge."

So just what is behind Watson? No fancy supercomputer. Just your regular old IBM Power 750 cluster (POWER7) with about 3000 cores. IBM workload-optimized systems provide unmatched capabilities for processing thousands of simultaneous tasks at rapid speeds. IBM systems can handle the massive analytics incredibly fast -- and that's what's needed to analyze complex language and deliver correct responses to natural language clues. Watson sifts through vast amounts of data and returns precise answers, ranking its confidence in its answers. This technology can be applied to many areas, everything from healthcare to help desks.